The KDE Community is happy to announce the immediate availability of the
first release candidate for KDE 4.0. This release candidate marks that
the majority of the components of KDE 4.0 are now approaching release quality.

While the final bits of Plasma, the brand new desktop shell and panel in KDE 4, are falling into place, the KDE
community decided to publish the first release candidate for the KDE 4.0
Desktop. Release Candidate 1 is the first preview of KDE 4.0 which is
suitable for general use and discovering the improvements that have taken
place over the entire KDE code base. The KDE Development Platform, the basis for developing KDE applications, is frozen and is now of release quality. The source code for the KDE Development Platform can be found under the "stable/3.96" subdirectory, on KDE's FTP server and mirrors.

Building on this, the majority of applications included in KDE 4.0 are now
usable for day to day use. The KDE Release Team has recently underlined this by calling
on the community to participate in reporting bugs during the time
remaining before the release of KDE 4.0 in December.

Meanwhile, preparations for the KDE 4.0 release events are ongoing, with the main event taking place January 2008 in Mountain View, California USA. Make sure you don't miss it!

many people says that kde3.0 was untable, full of bug and that kde will be the same, but kde4 look really stable, some parts crash, but the are apps like juk, kwin4 like composite works without problems, dolphin stable, i have hope that when kde4.0 is released can be used like kde3.5.x.

remember that kde3 apps work just fine in kde4 sessions. yesterday i accidently launched konqueror from kde3 and it took me a few moments to figure out why it looked so odd, even if the rendering viewport was updating better. ;)

> can be used like kde3.5.x

well, it'll be usable for day to day work. 3.5 was rather polished, though. but yeah, you should be able to get by just fine =)

>remember that kde3 apps work just fine in kde4 sessions. yesterday i accidently launched konqueror from kde3 and it took me a few moments to figure out why it looked so odd, even if the rendering viewport was updating better. ;)

First: Thanks to all the KDE-Devs for your hard work! I'm shure KDE4 will rock!

I'm currently switching back from Kubuntu to Debian unstable. It's been a while, since I last used Sid, so here my question: are RC-Packages uploaded to unstable, or just to experimental?
Hopefully the Debian KDE maintainers release a new livecd with RC1-Packages soon (currently beta4):http://pkg-kde.alioth.debian.org/kde4livecd.html

They are only in experimental. However you can run them very easily. Add the experimental repos to your sources.list, then start aptitude with aptitude -t experimental, and upgrade all your KDE packages to 3.9.96. When I upgraded from KDE3 to KDE4 beta 3, it more or less hosed my KDE installation, and I had to force some packages to install manually with dpkg. However it is getting better and better, so soon you should be able to run all the KDE3 apps side by side with the kde4 versions.

At the moment, most of RC1 is there.. Still waiting for oxygen icons package to be able to upgrade kdebase, but everything else upgraded fine.

Hosed as in "I had to uninstall a lot of KDE3 apps because they conflicted with KDE4 packages". Not sure if this is still the case

Seems like digikam and kmail can be used side by side with KDE4. Not 100% sure because I don't use them myself. However some apps (yakuake for example) will not conflict but will no longer run (crashes on start).

now the only conflicts are kcontrol, kdebase-bin-kde3, kdesktop, kformula, and kpersonalizer. Oh and the oxygen icon package is now in experimental also. I intend to be totally insane and go fully experimental and unstable.

Congratulations guys, I am using an svn version updated an hour ago and it rocks! The only small problems I see are:
a) System tray is WIP
b) Krunner dialog looked nicer in last weeks version
c) Still can't drag 'widgets' to the bottombar (which is immovable)
d) Location bar height has been squeezed to < font height in Konq
e) Okular will not show PS in the window but in a tiny separate window.
These are mostly cosmetic problems and are clearly obvious to the talented developers (so I don't clutter bugs.kde with them). This is just to forewarn those who will be testing this Beta.

Looking good guys! - Especially with the dark 'Wonton Soup' colorscheme for those of us who value our retinas ;)

Looks like the day I'm goind to do the switch to 4 is coming near.
Just some questions about KDE4, so I can decide if RC1 is for me:

- Does it use much more resources than 3? I have a small duron 1.6Ghz with 512 RAM, you know.
- is it stable enought to at least run without crashing without user interaction? (I mean, opening ktorrent and letting the box downloading) :)

CPU is rarely the bottleneck nowadays, do here are some informal mem stats. Here, "memory use" is defined as the entry in the "used" column and the "-/+ buffers/cache:" row in the output of free -m. Note that I use my own custom Qemu VM image, so there is some overhead - in particular, it uses the KDE3 KDM. The KDE4 install was compiled with maximum debugging info, then all executables were stripped with objdump.

- X + KDM only (baseline): 34M
- Boot to default Plasma, with background (+wallpaper), panel, klipper, Kickoff and Clock: 76M
- As above, but with a Konsole open (2 tabs), very small KWord (alpha still!) document, very small kwrite document, and Konqueror with one tab open to dot.kde.org - 142MB.

So I think it's using slightly more than KDE3 at the moment (although if someone running KDE3 could repeat the experiment and give numbers, that would be great!), but considering the devs are mainly at the Make It Work/ Make it Work Well phase, rather than the Make it Work Fast (and Light), I think it's doing pretty OK. IIRC, KWord took up a big chunk of this, which comes as no surprise as it is still alpha.

CPU is an issue with my wife. She has a 750 Mhz Duron machine with 512 MB RAM. Now she is using KDE 3.5.8 and it's not fast but fast enough. I would like to put KDE 4 on her computer but, if it is much slower that 3.5 I won't change it over. I guess I'll stop upgrading her box before KDE 4 goes into Lenny (now I upgrade it with apt-get from time to time).

It's not that we are poor; we can afford to buy her a new computer but she wouldn't want to buy one when she's getting along just fine with what she has.

I think you shouldn't count on KDE 4.0 being as fast and optimized as 3.5.8. It will get better over time as things stabilize a bit, but I think the focus for 4.0 is on getting it to work, not on getting it to work fast.

Interesting that this bug appears here again. I don't use KDE4 and had this problem for ages with Kubuntu. After every "apt-get upgrade" the problem was back again and I had to do a CHMOD on that file. I always thought it was a distro problem and a little bit annoyed that they didnt solve this seemingly simple bug for years.

I think this is the lowest priority for now.
This site uses slashcode (some old version i guess), it does the job well enough. Even though i'm a hardcore KDE user and like eye-candy, i don't see any reason to "upgrade" the site to a different back-end.